It is the lower portion of a cross shaft, surviving to a total length of 0.88 metres, and it retains its tenon, the shaped projection at the base that would once have slotted down into a separate stone socket to hold the whole cross upright. That the tenon survives at all is worth noting; it gives a precise sense of how such crosses were engineered, fitted together from separate dressed stones rather than carved from a single block.

The site is Sevenchurches, the local name for the early Christian monastic complex at Glendalough in County Wicklow, one of the most significant ecclesiastical settlements in early medieval Ireland. The cross fragment measures 0.38 metres at its widest and just 0.10 metres thick, proportions that suggest a relatively slender, upright form rather than the broad slab-like profile of some early Irish stone crosses. The tenon itself is 0.16 metres long and 0.29 metres wide, and notably it sits flush with one face of the shaft rather than being centred, a small but telling detail about how the piece was worked. On the upper face, as recorded in 2005, there is linear decoration, carved lines whose precise pattern is not described further but which place the fragment within the long tradition of ornamental stonework associated with Irish monastic sites.